Here u go
@ 9:32 - "Trust in Trump"... so does this somehow raise the possibility that Trump is only pretending to be readying for full war, in order to intimidate the Iranians into making major concessions they might not otherwise make? Is that possible here, or is it highly unlikely?
I don't know how likely it is. Trump is a "Speak Loudly and Swing Your Stick Around" sort of guy. He does it with tariffs all the time, slapping huge tariffs on countries only to have to roll them back when people stand up to him. That's why he's the TACO President. But swinging that stick is part of his persona. He's caught up in appearing tough.
Now it's one thing to do it with tariffs (not a good thing), but it's another to do it with US military intervention. That's a stick that once swung, is hard to chicken out on. So one problem with that "I'm a big tough guy, I'm Patrick Swayze in Road House, my way or the highway" strategy comes when someone calls that bluff. Cause if you ain't Patrick Swayze, lots of bad shit can happen.
He's already shown he's no Patrick Swayze with his TACO tariff disaster. So
if he's trying to bluff and say we're going to bog ourselves down in a other State-Building war in the Middle East, what happens if Tehran calls him on it? With tariffs, he works out a "deal" which is usually just what we were doing before and declares victory. But if Tehran says "bring it" after Trump has threatened to bring it so hard...then what? You can't back out of military intervention as easily as walking back tariffs.
Does Big Man Trump make good on the threats and get us stuck in another war in the Middle East? Or does he tuck tail and run?
Of course there's always reality, and here Israel and Iran have a history of these skirmishes, and both sides talk huge and kill some folk, and in the end back down. This ain't the first time. And I think most folk are hoping for that pattern, that Israel and Iran will allow cooler heads to prevail and reach a ceasefire for awhile. Usually the US President isn't sitting around trying to inflame the situation, but it's still the hope.
In that case, then Trump will 100% claim that was his plan all along, his MAGA commies will pretend it was the plan all along. For one of the things Trump excels at is taking credit, even if he had no hand in it.
